In the late '90s, as his star was rising with huge hits like Se7en and A River Runs Through It, Pitt himself was sinking into a depression and turning to drugs to deal.

"I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s: I was hiding out from the celebrity thing; I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut; and I really got irritated with myself," Pitt told The Hollywood Reporter.

"I got to: 'What's the point? I know better than this.' I used to deal with depression, but I don't now, not this decade -- maybe last decade. But that's also figuring out who you are. I see it as a great education, as one of the seasons or a semester: 'This semester I was majoring in depression.'"

"I was doing the same thing every night and numbing myself to sleep -- the same routine: Couldn't wait to get home and hide out," he explained. "But that feeling of unease was growing and one night I just said, 'This is a waste.'"

What brought him out of his funk? A trip to Morocco, "where I saw poverty to an extreme I had never witnessed before, and we talked about inequality and health care, and I saw just what I felt was so unnecessary, that people should have to survive in these circumstances -- and the children were inflicted with a lot of deformities, and things that could have been avoided had become their sentence. It stuck with me."

The experience gave Pitt the kick in the butt he needed to make a change, "I just quit. I stopped grass then -- I mean, pretty much -- and decided to get off the couch."